The John le Carré of Ulster loyalism

Even as the Northern Irish peace process has consolidated and the world’s attention has turned elsewhere, one writer remains marginalised because of his plays

by Colin Murphy

One evening in November 2005, as Gary Mitchell sat on his sofa at home in a Belfast suburb, watching Rangers play Porto on the telly, he heard his wife shout from the kitchen: “They’re on top of the car!” Then, she shouted, “They’re smashing the windows! It’s on fire!”

He grabbed a baseball bat, and rushed outside. There was a series of small explosions as the tyres on the burning car – his car – burst. Behind him, his wife had panicked; she had picked up their seven-year-old son and fled out the back of the house. When the police arrived, hours later, Mitchell asked what had taken them so long. “We were busy with the rest of your family,” they said.

His family’s homes had also been targeted, as had that of a stranger mistaken for one of his family. “What’s going on?” he asked the two policemen. “You should stop writing these plays that annoy people,” said one. “Or just leave,” said the other.

“Stopping writing just wasn’t an option,” says Mitchell, when we meet in Belfast. “So I took my family, and we left.”

’The Taigs will get you’

Gary Mitchell was an unlikely playwright. Though “the Troubles” (as the Northern Irish conflict is known) has produced an extensive body of artistic work (1), none of it has come from where Mitchell comes from. That is an area north of Belfast called Rathcoole. In 1965, when he was born, Rathcoole was an area of mixed religion and social class. But by the mid 1970s the population had fallen by half, and it had become a garrison of working-class (and unemployed) loyalism, dominated by paramilitary organisations such as the Ulster Defence Association, or UDA (2).

Mitchell’s first encounter with the UDA came in 1974 when he attempted to cross a barricade set up at the entrance to Rathcoole, during the Loyalist Workers’ Strike, in order to visit some friends. “Outside Rathcoole are Taigs,” the UDA told him. “These Taigs will get you and they will hurt you, or worse.”

The “Taigs” were Catholics. Though Mitchell didn’t know any, and his parents held no bias, the Taigs became the bogeymen of his boyhood. And, gradually, “the fear of the bogeyman turned to hatred”.

“When I look back now, the journey is clear: to become a man in that culture, you cast off your fear of the Taig, and you start hating the Taig, and you start plotting against the Taig. The notion of not leaving Rathcoole because you were afraid is transformed into the intention to leave Rathcoole to hurt people, and then rush back into the safety of Rathcoole.”

He eventually tried to join the UDA, but his father, who had previously been a member (and had left, disillusioned by rising criminality), blocked him. Mitchell had by then left school, early, and was barely educated. “I doubt I could read a newspaper properly.”

Eventually, he got a lowly job in the civil service, and the bleakness of it convinced him that he had to educate himself. He joined an amateur drama group, but grew quickly frustrated that none of what they did reflected the reality of where he was from. “You keep going on about there being no plays about Protestants,” his colleagues (who were Catholics) told him. “So go away and write one.”

He bought a dictionary and a thesaurus, and started to read them, daily. Gradually, he noticed his articulacy improve. He stumbled upon a BBC radio-play competition, and entered. He won. He wrote more radio plays, and then some plays for a Belfast theatre company. When his second stage play didn’t get on in Belfast, the script wound its way to the Irish national theatre, the Abbey, in Dublin. In a Little World of Our Own shone a light inside the murky world of post-ceasefire loyalism, revealing previously hidden tensions underlying the universally acclaimed peace process.

It won that year’s Irish Theatre Award for best new play. The veteran political commentator Dick Walsh wrote that it “bristles with edginess and menace, as a generation that has grown up with guns and masks and baseball bats is asked to talk to people it has been taught to hate”.

But in Rathcoole, there was less interest in the content of what Mitchell was saying than in where he was saying it. “I was spat at in the street, and punched in the chest. It was the fact that Catholics were clapping, that I was getting awards from Taigs in Dublin. They thought I must be a traitor.”

Unlike the Northern nationalist community, where even active politicians double as writers (Gerry Adams, for example, has published memoirs and fiction), the loyalist community had no tradition of art or literature. “It’s our inferiority complex. We believe we can’t be writers.”

Mitchell proved the exception. He wrote further plays for the Abbey, and then for the Royal Court in London. One of his plays, As the Beast Sleeps, was filmed by the BBC in 2002 (although not available commercially, it remains one of the outstanding Irish films of recent years).

He became, effectively, the John le Carré of Ulster loyalism, doing for the peace process what le Carré did for the cold war: he took the grubby compromises, conflicted loyalties and sickening violence that underlay the rhetoric, and brought it to the stage in taut thrillers with anti-heroes at their heart. His anti-heroes, though, were not flattered. He was repeatedly warned off, sometimes with violence. At one point, somebody shot through the window of his home study. But the incidents didn’t seem organised, and he didn’t pay much attention. “Growing up in Rathcoole, somebody tells you they’re ‘going to fucking kill you’ every single day. I didn’t see the pattern.”

That pattern became clear in retrospect when his car was firebombed. That made him, briefly, a cause célèbre. “One of the most talked about voices in European theatre is in hiding,” reported The Guardian. “There were tons of letters and articles,” recalls Mitchell. “But that attention lasted about a day. The real things that I needed were missing.” What were they? “Productions.”

“These are my weapons. They can use firebombs and guns, shoot through my window, blow up my car. My weapons are plays. Before the firebombing of my car I had 16 stage plays produced in Belfast, Dublin, London and Londonderry. I had 18 radio plays broadcast on the BBC, and three television plays, and won nine awards. Since the firebombing, I’ve done four radio plays and one stage play” (3).

No longer so shocking

Why such a fall off? He doesn’t know. His writing suffered initially, because of the dislocation, but he is writing furiously again, and has numerous scripts under consideration with theatres and commissioning editors.

But it may be that the world outside has moved on. The young man who emerged to tell a shocking story of the bleak reality of disaffected loyalism is no longer so young, and that story is no longer so shocking.

Part of the reason it is no longer so shocking, of course, is because he has told it so well. For Mark Phelan of Queen’s University Belfast, Mitchell’s plays provided a “necessary counterpoint” to the “relentlessly upbeat” coverage of the peace process. But Phelan worries that Mitchell, paradoxically, might be trapped by the very community that has excluded him.

“Working class loyalism was the most underrepresented constituency in Ireland. But Gary Mitchell helped to change that. He covered that terrain for ten to fifteen years. So where does he go from here?”

Anthony McIntyre, a former IRA prisoner who became an outspoken dissident voice within republicanism, had similar experiences to Mitchell, though never as severe. He set up an influential online “free speech” journal, The Blanket (4), “because society is better off when it knows more rather than less”.

McIntyre believed that the republican leadership had constructed “a regime of truth” (quoting Foucault) in order to persuade the nationalist community that the peace process did not involve reneging on their core objective of a united Ireland. In enforcing that regime, they were prepared to isolate and alienate dissident voices – such as his own. “I was ostracised. They picketed my home. I was physically attacked on the street once.”

But, as the political process has evolved, this regime has dissipated. “It’s much easier to be a dissenting voice in nationalist Belfast now than it was in my day [1997 to 2007].” Gary Mitchell wonders might that be the case, too, in loyalist Belfast. “I still have a deep and sincere understanding of the people that attacked my home,” he says. “I don’t support the action that they took, but I support their right to feel what they feel. I still want to drag people out of Rathcoole and get them into the arts. I would love them to see films in the cinema about themselves. I would love to make a film in Rathcoole. It is six years later. Maybe this is the time.”

Is it safe? He doesn’t know. “It would be a good challenge though, wouldn’t it?”